Online Training and e-Learning

Online training, or e-Learning as it is also known, is set to become more and more popular in the future. Not only does it offer new training opportunities for individuals and organisations that previously would not have existed, it also has a whole range of other benefits and advantages over traditional, classroom-based training. However, online training also has its negative aspects. In this article, we'll look at the pros and cons of this 21st century training media.

Advantages

The most obvious benefit e-Learning has over its classroom counterpart is that the user (i.e. those being trained) can complete the course at any time and from any location in the world with access to the internet. This means businesses (or individuals if they are undertaking the training course for personal reasons) no longer need to fork out vast sums of money on things like transportation and hotel rooms, not to mention the working time that is lost whilst the person is doing the course instead of their job.

It is the saving of both time and money that makes online training more attractive than traditional training courses. As well as the money saved from delegates not having to travel, online courses are nearly always much less expensive than classroom-based training courses. This is because the training provider does not need to spend money on venue costs, trainer salaries, refreshments etc. With their overheads low, firms can charge a much smaller price whilst still making an acceptable profit. As a result, businesses with little cash to spend on training can now afford to put its workforce through a training course which should hopefully increase their productivity and value to the firm.

Another advantage of online training is that the user can work through the course at their own pace. In a traditional course, delegates are required to go at the speed of the trainer, who may be going too fast if there is a lot of material to get through, in which case delegates may miss important bits of information, or even too slowly which can lead to attentions to be lost, also resulting in the person on the course not taking in everything that is being taught.

Online training courses can also be brightly coloured and attention-grabbing, as well as informative. As mentioned in the paragraph above, if a person is bored their attention can be lost as their mind wanders onto other things. There is a significant danger of this happening on lecture-like classroom training courses in which a trainer simply stands up in front of the group and talks for hours. A good online course will be interactive, keeping the user's attention and so making sure they absorb as much of what the course is teaching them as possible.

Unlike classroom-based training, the majority of online courses can be done more than once without charge (usually an unlimited number of times within a certain time period), meaning that any information that was missed the first time by the person doing the course can be found by simply going back and re-doing the online course. With conventional training, the only way a person can go back over something they've missed is to pay the course fee again and re-do the whole course!